Their enemies called them the Nachthexen, or Night Witches. During the Second World War, the pilots of the Soviet Union’s 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew low-altitude harassment campaigns against Nazi troops on the eastern front, dropping explosives on their positions from the silent, dark sky. Most demoralizing of all to the German soldiers, the Soviet regiment was made up entirely of women in their teens and early 20s.

It’s a fascinating chapter in history, and the U.K.–based band Wolf People tells it vividly through its song “Night Witch”. As the track alternates between stately, melodic verses and passages of blisteringly heavy acid-etched lead guitar, frontman Jack Sharp sings “I’d fly every night if I could/On wings of paper and wood/Delivering death wherever I go/As graceful and quiet as snow.”

Reached at his home in Bedford, England, Sharp tells the Straight he would rather draw inspiration from history or folktales than pen confessional lyrics about his romantic ups and downs. Even so, the singer-guitarist inevitably finds that his personal life has informed his work more than he expected.

“That’s all in there,” he acknowledges. “I struggle to find interesting viewpoints to write about that kind of stuff from. It’s been written about so many times before, and personally, as a listener I don’t like listening to stuff that sounds like someone complaining about their girlfriend or boyfriend, you know what I mean? And you get that quite a lot. I would rather that it looked at it from a different angle. You can still write songs that are like that, that are about relationships, but you have to find some kind of angle that hasn’t been done before. And I think that’s really, really hard, so I’ve almost taken an easy route out, and find stories to write about.

“Often you’ll find out about something and you’ll write a story about something that’s historical, in folklore, or whatever, and you’ll look back at it and go, ‘No, that is actually about something that’s happened to me,’ ” the singer-guitarist continues. “Or it is about a relationship that I’m involved with or something that is happening in my life as well. That’s why we like folk music, because it’s kind of universal truth. It’s the same things that everyone deals with.”

Indeed, Wolf People started out as a solo project inspired by Brit-folk revivalists including Pentangle, Fotheringay, and Fairport Convention. When recording last year’s Ruins, however, the quartet (which also includes drummer Tom Watt, guitarist Joe Hollick, and bassist Dan Davies) fully indulged its riff-rocking tendencies, taking inspiration from the likes of Black Sabbath and its more obscure Scottish contemporary Iron Claw. As it turns out, though, Sharp long ago internalized the folkloric sounds of the British Isles.

“With the last record, I consciously was like, ‘I don’t think we need to try to put folk music into it,’ because it’s so much a part of our musical background—me and Joe more than the other guys—that if we write something, it has those modes in it,” he says. “It has those tunes within it. So we don’t need to try to make it folk-rock anymore; it just is.

“I actually tried to get rid of all traces of traditional and folk-sounding stuff in the record, but it didn’t work,” Sharp admits. “It’s still there. Which is nice.”

Wolf People plays the Fox Cabaret on Monday (August 7).